People work side-by-side with robots in factories, warehouses, mines, oil-fields and other unsafe environments, making work safer and increasing productivity. Fleets of self-driving cars enable people to socialize, work during their commute, and increase the safety and efficiency of our transport systems. Drones deliver packages to us increasing convenience, reducing emissions, and further freeing our roads and rails for transportation of people.

Much of this technology exists on its own – but none of it is in widespread use. These technologies span three similar areas – robotics, Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine communication (M2M) – all of which suffer from similar challenges to widespread adoption.

It is well-known that security and privacy are huge issues – and rightly so – nobody wants data about their travel, energy usage, food consumption or other identifying fingerprints exploited. Hacking autonomous vehicles has the potential for chaos, extreme loss of life and crippling the economies that would grow to depend on them.

In my opinion, however, this is not the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is fragmentation and re-invention that goes on just bringing products to market in these areas. Whether it’s in robotics, home automation, connected devices, automated cars, forklifts and machinery – everybody starts from scratch.

The way we build connected things is all wrong. First we start with a computer. It can be something cheap and simple like an Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, or really high end – eight core Intel computer with dual video cards – and every specialized creation in between.

Here’s a closer look at four of the biggest challenges holding back robotics adoption.

Fragmented Platforms – One to Rule Them All?

The first issue is that none of these existing “platforms” were built to easily connect to a variety of parts that make interacting with environments easy. Some were built to make building hobby projects, like a connected plant, very easy to get going without a ton of expertise, while others were built to be fast video game computers, but also used for vision intensive robotics applications.

Some are low energy, but lack processing power. Some are powerful, but are heavy, hot, energy hogs that require large batteries.

Almost none are modular. None are standard. None are designed specifically for building devices that collect data from and interact with the environment.

Jason Ernst, PhD Candidate, CS, is the CTO of Redtree Robotics. Ernst took first place in CODE 2014, Canada’s largest hackathon with 930 participants. Redtree Robotics develops the Hydra chipset, which is designed for communication between more than one robot.